Description: A large-scale AI-assisted financial scam, allegedly operated from Tbilisi, Georgia, used deepfake celebrity endorsements and manipulated victims through fraudulent trading dashboards that simulated high returns. Call center agents, trained with AI-driven persuasion tactics, convinced individuals to invest more money while falsely promising profits. Many reportedly lost their life savings, with the total losses reaching $35M across more than 6,000 victims.
Editor Notes: Note on the timeline: These scams began sometime in May 2022, but The Guardian's investigation was published on 03/05/2025.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Unknown deepfake technology developers , Third-Party AI Service Providers for Call Center Training and Fraudulent Trading Platform Developers developed an AI system deployed by Scammer Operatives in Georgia, Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Spain , Meri Shotadze , Golden Currencies , Akaki Kevkhishvili , AK Group and AdmiralsFX, which harmed Small business owners , Retirees seeking investment opportunities , People with neurological disorders , Individuals deceived by celebrity deepfake impersonations , Financial professionals , Financial fraud victims and Elderly investors.
Incident Stats
Incident ID
962
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2025-03-05
Editors
Daniel Atherton
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
Ben Fogle was not a happy man.
“Not sure I need to highlight this,” the broadcaster posted on Instagram during the spring of 2024, “but the deepfake of me from [ITV’s] This Morning … circulating on Facebook [and] advertising crypto is a sca…
- "Regular" clones are so 2023: With AI-generated passports, deepfakes and websites, fraudsters are running sophisticated, large-scale, ultra-realistic scams.
- "It's a speed game", said Exante's Head of Compliance, "You need AI tools to copy …
Variants
A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.
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